Colin Davidson: Twelve Paintings \u2013 Conversations with Mark Carruthers <\/p>\n
Author: Mark Carruthers<\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 9781785375729<\/p>\n
Publisher: Merrion Press<\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u20ac35<\/p>\n
The last time I was in London I saw the crowd queuing in Trafalgar Square to see the Van Goghs and ducked around the back to the peace of the National Portrait Gallery. This lesser-visited province of Britain\u2019s visual history is the dominion of Holbein and van Dyck, of privilege and grandeur. <\/p>\n
That day Colin Davidson\u2019s Silent Testimony was on show, the corridors of watchful eyes giving way to 18 portraits of individuals whose lives were affected by the Troubles. I had seen the paintings before in Belfast, but there in London, I cried, the gathering of lines and colours a gentle storm in the exhibition room. The art of Silent Testimony is its own ethical alchemy, and suggests the dimensions of Davidson\u2019s gift, which is to create a shared landscape of feeling from the fragments of history, place, and each worn face.<\/p>\n
That gift is explored throughout Twelve Paintings, which is a study of Davidson\u2019s art from the beginning to the present, with a thoughtful foreword by the actor Simon Callow. The spine of the book is Davidson\u2019s conversations with the journalist and critic Mark Carruthers, who draws the artist out with sympathetic awareness. This is careful work, and beautifully done, as together the two establish a pattern of practice from the paintings, sketches, models and photographs that makes Twelve Paintings a rich and inspiring document of one of Ireland\u2019s great contemporary artists. <\/p>\n